How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,When the miserly press of each day’s needAches to a narrowness of spilled distractionMy soul appalled at the world’s work’s time-greed?How can I pause my thoughts upon the taskMy soul was born to think that it must doWhen every moment has a thought to askTo fit the immediate craving of its cue?The coin I’d heap for marrying my MuseAnd build our home i’th’ greater Time-to-beBecomes dissolved by needs of each day’s useAnd I feel beggared of infinity,Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-drivenBy his own act to forfeit his wished heaven.

Sonnet VI

As a bad orator, badly o’er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
What should have been an inner instinct’s feat;
Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,
Lacking the subtler music in his measure,
With useless care labours but to be spurned,
Courting in alien speech the Muse’s pleasure;
I study how to love or how to hate,
Estranged by consciousness from sentiment,
With a thought feeling forced to be sedate
Even when the feeling’s nature is violent;
As who would learn to swim without the river,
When nearest to the trick, as far as ever.

Sonnet VII

Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee-That entire death shall null my entire thought;And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.Shall that of me that now contains the starsBe by the very contained stars survived?Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth barsAn all unjust Fate’s truth from being believed?Conjecture cannot fit to the seen worldA garment of its thought untorn or covering,Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworldWithout itself its dead deceit discovering;So, all being possible, an idle thought mayLess idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.

“The Royal, a bar that’s practically empty during the day. A big room with high ceilings, colored moldings, and pictures by a pal of the owner on the walls. It isn’t really designed for broad daylight, what seems fabulous at night looks a bit tatty by day. Just pushing open the door to the bar is reassuring in itself, in spite of the combined smell of stale tobacco and cleaning products.
“Ooooh, old lady! In one of our moods are we?”
Jérémy, behind the bar, bursts out laughing when he sees her. She would like to stay looking furious, on her high horse, but it doesn’t work. She smiles, and leans on the counter.
“Can you put it on my tab? Till Tuesday?”
“I’d like to say no, but I can see you’d smash the place up. A Jack?”
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” she chants, twisting her head on her neck to make the vertebrae click. That very morning, leaning over the washbasin, vomiting up her guts, she had sworn not to have a drink at all today. Her liver’s crying out for understanding, mercy, and respite. But seeing how the day’s turning out, to remain clearheaded wouldn’t be appropriate.
Gloria takes her glass and goes over to a seat. Slight headache, backache, she feels stiff. The warmth of the alcohol immediately unlocks her joints, her knees, the insides of her wrists and elbows. Something relaxes. But it’s still not enough to let her draw breath without pain.
She’s been here before, of course she has, she knows the score by heart. Pain doesn’t lessen with age, on the contrary. But she knows there’s nothing to be done, except wait, day after day, for it to get bearable. Another failure, par for the course, another breakup.
Gloria’s not her real name. Her parents had her christened Stéphanie. But even in primary school she’d changed it, every new year she tried a different one. That wreaked havoc when the teachers realized what she was up to, and it made the other kids suspicious when they figured out she was lying. She’d almost given up when Gloria the “punk princess” became a media icon. She realized it was time to settle on something. It was the early eighties, and she’d just discovered that there was something out there that spoke to her: the Sex Pistols, Bérurier Noir, Sham 69, and Taxi Girl. Hair carefully dyed electric blue, one evening in town she’d met this young guy who’d shown her the three chords for “Gloria” on a guitar.”

Poetry, music, I have loved, and yetBecause of those new deadThat come into my soul and escapeConfusion of the bed,Or those begotten or unbegottenPerning in a band,

I bend my body to the spadeOr grope with a dirty hand.

Or those begotten or unbegotten,For I would not recallSome that being unbegottenAre not individual,But copy some one action,Moulding it of dust or sand,

I bend my body to the spadeOr grope with a dirty hand.

An old ghost’s thoughts are lightning,To follow is to die;Poetry and music I have banished,But the stupidityOf root, shoot, blossom or clayMakes no demand.

I bend my body to the spadeOr grope with a dirty hand.

To Songs Of A Fool

IA Speckled cat and a tame hareEat at my hearthstoneAnd sleep there;And both look up to me aloneFor learning and defenceAs I look up to providence.I start out of my sleep to thinkSome day I may forgetTheir food and drink;Or, the house door left unshut,The hare may run till it’s foundThe horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.I bear a burden that might well tryMen that do all by rule,And what can IThat am a wandering-witted foolBut pray to God that He easeMy great responsibilities?I slept on my three-legged stool by thc fire.The speckled cat slept on my knee;We never thought to enquireWhere the brown hare might be,And whether the door were shut.Who knows how she drank the windStretched up on two legs from the mat,Before she had settled her mindTo drum with her heel and to leap?Had I but awakened from sleepAnd called her name, she had heard.It may be, and had not stirred,That now, it may be, has foundThe horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

“In the days that followed his showing up at the shop, I tracked down some old friends. A few had lost touch with Nicky altogether, but several had heard that he’d died and one said it was in a road accident. I didn’t ask for the details. Something held me back from telling them about his visit to the shop. Everywhere I checked, the story was the same. University College London was even setting up a memorial fellowship named after him. But Nicky wasn’t dead, and it seemed as though only he and I knew it.
The only way I could make sense of it was to assume that Nicky had got into some kind of trouble and taken a desperate decision to run away from it. It was completely out of character for him, but no other explanation fitted the facts. I knew I hadn’t seen a ghost. He was too material for that.
And besides, I think men, even the good ones, are more apt to cut and run than we are. Ted walked out when Babette was six months old; he said he’d found someone who could make him happier than I could. This woman turned out to be a twenty-four-year-old Italian translator he’d met at a convention in Düsseldorf. That miserable period coincided with the date of Nicky’s death, which might explain why it didn’t make more of an impression on me. All the bad news got rolled up together in one big indigestible lump.
It was almost a year before I saw him again. I was closing up the shop at the end of one of those short December days, rushing because the book group was meeting at my house that evening. Just as I was about to leave, I remembered that it was Kath’s birthday. I unlocked the front door and went back in to get her one of the ceramic Seletti jugs shaped like a milk carton. Sleet was rattling against the shopfront. I grabbed some wrapping paper and a bag to keep it all dry. When I turned round there was a dark shape in the doorway. I froze. The jug slipped out of my hand and smashed on the floor.
“Sukie?” he said.
I felt a little breathless. For an instant, the last twenty-odd years vanished like a trick of the light: no Leonora, no Ted, no kids, no break-ups and false starts, no aging, only the two of us in the half-dark just like the first time I kissed him in Grantchester Meadows.“

“If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints. “Either” is perhaps misleading, for most of the painters are fishers also in their spare time. To be neither of these things is considered odd and almost eccentric. Fish is the standard topic of conversation in the pub and the post-office, in the garage and the street, with every sort of person, from the man who arrives for the season with three Hardy rods and a Rolls-Royce, to the man who leads a curious, contemplative life, watching the salmon-nets on the Dee. Weather, which in other parts of the Kingdom is gauged by the standards of the farmer, the gardener, and the weekender, is considered in Galloway in terms of fish and paint. The fisherman-painter has the best of the bargain as far as the weather goes, for the weather that is too bright for the trout deluges his hills and his sea with floods of radiant colour; the rain that interrupts picture-making puts water into the rivers and the locks and sends him hopefully forth with rod and creel; while on cold dull days, when there is neither purple on the hills nor fly on the river, he can join a friendly party in a cosy bar and exchange information about Cardinals and March Browns, and practise making intricate knots in gut.
The artistic centre of Galloway is Kirkcudbright, where the painters form a scattered constellation, whose nucleus is in the High Street, and whose outer stars twinkle in remote hillside cottages, radiating brightness as far as Gatehouse-of-Fleet. There are large and stately studios, panelled and high, in strong stone houses filled with gleaming brass and polished oak. There are workaday studios—summer perching-places rather than settled homes–where a good north light and a litter of brushes and canvas form the whole of the artistic stock-in-trade. There are little homely studios, gay with blue and red and yellow curtains and odd scraps of pottery, tucked away down narrow closes and adorned with gardens, where old-fashioned flowers riot in the rich and friendly soil. There are studios that are simply and solely barns, made beautiful by ample proportions and high-pitched rafters, and habitable by the addition of a tortoise stove and a gas-ring. There are artists who have large families and keep domestics in cap and apron; artists who engage rooms, and are taken care of by landladies; artists who live in couples or alone, with a woman who comes in to clean; artists who live hermit-like and do their own charing. There are painters in oils, painters in water-colour, painters in pastel, etchers and illustrators, workers in metal; artists of every variety, having this one thing in common–that they take their work seriously and have no time for amateurs.”

If that apparent part of life’s delightOur tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seenBy aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.Haply Truth’s body is no eyable being,Appearance even as appearance lies,Haply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeingIs the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.Wherefrom what comes to thought’s sense of life? Nought.All is either the irrational world we seeOr some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rotIts use for our thought’s use. Whence taketh meA qualm-like ache of life, a body-deepSoul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.

Sonnet III

When I do think my meanest line shall beMore in Time’s use than my creating whole,That future eyes more clearly shall feel meIn this inked page than in my direct soul;When I conjecture put to make me seeingGood readers of me in some aftertime,Thankful to some idea of my beingThat doth not even my with gone true soul rime;An anger at the essence of the world,That makes this thus, or thinkable this wise,Takes my soul by the throat and makes it hurledIn nightly horrors of despaired surmise,And I become the mere sense of a rageThat lacks the very words whose waste might ‘suage.

Sonnet IV

I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;Yet thou liv’dst entire in my seeing thoughtAnd what thou wert in me had never fled.Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty-Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss’s readiness,And memory had taught my heart the dutyTo know thee ever at that deathlessness.But when I came where thou wert laid, and sawThe natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame,And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw,Framing the stone to age where was thy name,I knew not how to feel, nor what to beTowards thy fate’s material secrecy.

I’m herdsman of a flock.The sheep are my thoughtsAnd my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and my earsAnd my hands and feetAnd nostrils and mouth.

To think a flower is to see and smell it.To eat a fruit is to sense its savor.

And that is why, when I feel sad,In a day of heat, because of so much joyAnd lay me down in the grass to restAnd close my sun-warmed eyes,I feel my whole body relaxed in realityAnd know the whole truth and am happy.

Vertaald door Edouard Roditi

Sonnet I

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.

However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.

The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.

We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

I don’t know if the stars rule the worldOr if Tarot or playing cardsCan reveal anything.I don’t know if the rolling of diceCan lead to any conclusion.But I also don’t knowIf anything is attainedBy living the way most people do.

Yes, I don’t knowIf I should believe in this daily rising sunWhose authenticity no one can guarantee me,Or if it would be better (because better or more convenient)To believe in some other sun,One that shines even at night,Some profound incandescence of things,Surpassing my understanding.

For now…(Let’s take it slow)For nowI have an absolutely secure grip on the stair-rail,I secure it with my hand –This rail that doesn’t belong to meAnd that I lean on as I ascend…Yes… I ascend…I ascend to this:I don’t know if the stars rule the world.

Magnificat

When will this inner night – the universe – end
And I – my soul – have my day?
When will I wake up from being awake?
I don’t know. The sun shines on high
And cannot be looked at.
The stars coldly blink
And cannot be counted.
The heart beats aloofly
And cannot be heard.
When will this drama without theater
– Or this theater without drama – end
So that I can go home?
Where? How? When?
O cat staring at me with eyes of life, Who lurks in your depths?
It’s Him! It’s him!
Like Joshua he’ll order the sun to stop, and I’ll wake up,
And it will be day.Smile, my soul, in your slumber!
Smile, my soul: it will be day!

Countless lives inhabit us

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

To see the fields and the river
It isn’t enough to open the window.
To see the trees and the flowers
It isn’t enough not to be blind.
It is also necessary to have no philosophy.
With philosophy there are no trees, just ideas.
There is only each one of us, like a cave.
There is only a shut window, and the whole world outside,
And a dream of what could be seen if the window were opened,
Which is never what is seen when the window is opened.

Oxfordshire

I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want nothing.I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left side,
And on my consciousness of existing.
I’m universally uncomfortable, metaphysically uncomfortable,
But what’s even worse is my headache.
That’s more serious than the meaning of the universe.

Once, while walking in the country around Oxford,
I saw up ahead, beyond a bend in the road,
A church steeple towering above the houses of a hamlet or village.
The photographic image of that non-event has remained with me
Like a horizontal wrinkle marring a trouser’s crease.
Today it seems relevant…
From the road I associated that steeple with spirituality,
The faith of all ages, and practical charity.
When I arrived at the village, the steeple was a steeple
And, what’s more, there it was.

You can be happy in Australia, as long as you don’t go there.

The gods grant nothing more than life

The gods grant nothing more than life,
So let us reject whatever lifts us
To unbreathable heights,
Eternal but flowerless.
All that we need to accept is science,
And as long as the blood in our veins still pulses
And love does not shrivel,
Let us go on
Like panes of glass: transparent to light,
Pattered by the sad rain trickling down,
Warmed by the sun,
And reflecting a little.

Listen, Daisy, When I Die, Although On an Orient-bound ship
December 1913
(as Álvaro de Campos)

Listen, Daisy. When I die, although
You may not feel a thing, you must
Tell all my friends in London how much
My loss makes you suffer. Then go

To York, where you claim you were born
(But I don’t believe a thing you claim),
To tell that poor boy who gave me
So many hours of joy (but of course

You don’t know about that) that I’m dead.
Even he, whom I thought I sincerely
Loved, won’t care…. Then go and break

The news to that strange girl Cecily,
Who believed that one day I’d be great….To hell with life and everyone in it!

I don’t Know if the Love You Give is Love You Have (as Ricardo Reis)

I don’t know if the love you give is love you have
Or love you feign. You give it to me. Let that suffice.
I can’t be young by years,
So why not by illusion?
The Gods give us little, and the little they give is false.
But if they give it, however false it be, the giving
Is true. I accept it, and resign
Myself to believing you.

In The Beginning Man Tried Ascending To Heaven via The Tower Of Babel. Now He Tries To Elevate His Existence Using Hallucinogenic Drugs. And, Since The 20th Century, He Continually Voyages Into Outer Space Using Spacecrafts. Prayer Thru Christ Is The Only Way To Reach Heaven.